In the Internet, there are several services enabling users at a computer with internet connection to locate and connect to other users. For example, instant messaging clients, such as ICQ and MSN Messenger, provide inexpensive connections to other users, wherein these programs usually run in the background of a computer and cause a message window to pop up on a screen once a new message is obtained.
Recently more complex services have been introduced to Internet users, which also allow sharing photo albums or “wall” applications, where a user can post a photo or write a message, which is then published to the other users of the same group. In all such services a basic feature is the possibility of getting notified when the shared resource has been updated by other users. For example, in social networking websites, such as Facebook, wall applications are provided to each user or group of users, where a user may publish a photo so that the photo may be seen by other users, which belong to the same group or which are connected as friends. Further, users may be notified of changes on the “walls”.
Notifying users of changes or updates is usually easy to do as long as an application keeps connected to an application server providing the service thus allowing the server to push out notifications. For example, in the Internet as long as the user is connected to a specific service of a website, the application server may constantly update the information of the website so that a user logged into his/her account can constantly receive updates.
However, receiving notifications and updates requires the application to stay alive at all times.
Currently, there is no comparable service and mechanism available for mobile phones. That is, sharing information or photos between users of a group is not easily possible. Existing services on mobile phones, such as short message service (SMS) and multimedia messaging service (MMS) enable to send information or photos to individual users, however, without the support of an application server managing different groups of users and their specific needs and interests.
Further, even if an application is provided on a mobile phone, which may connect to an application server providing a specific service, it is necessary that the application is active at all times. In contrast to applications running on a computer, applications running on a mobile phone do not regularly run in the background of the mobile phone, for example, due to memory and processor constraints.
Therefore, if users of the group are offline, i.e. the application of their mobile phone is not connected to the application server, these users are not notified, i.e. are not provided with updated information.
One alternative way to provide a user of mobile phone with updated information, when the application is inactive but the mobile phone is on, is to send an SMS to the user from the application server or from another user who has updated information.
However, sending information to a large number of mobile phones by SMS can be expensive and complicated for the user, especially since the user does not know which mobile phones have to be provided with the information. Namely the user does not necessarily know which other mobile phones belong to the same group or which other mobile phones have an inactive application and cannot receive information from an application server. Furthermore, most information may not be provided by simple SMS messages, such as photos or other multimedia content.